Monday, 9 November 2009

Supernova (2000)

Directed by: "Thomas Lee" - aka. The new Alan Smithee. In reality, this was a combination of Walter "Mad Max" Hill and Francis"Model T" Ford Coppola and some other bloke
Starring: Some respectable actors and Lou Diamond Phillips

It's taken me four days to watch this. Seriously. Four fucking days. I started watching this on Thursday, but due to time dilation, time was moving quicker everywhere else other than inside the bubble of me and the film. This caused quite a problem. 10 minutes of the film was actually 2 hours of "reality". And the problem was getting worse as I then started noticing that for every minute of film time, more time was passing on the outside. I got worried that perhaps I'd start missing important things in the "real world", like work, birthdays, Y10K. Only now on Monday have I actually finished it, but that was largely due to coming into possession of a Macguffin that allowed me phase the two pockets of time and not risk missing our sun's own Supernova (okay, I know that as ours is a Class G2 star so will have a red giant stage before shrinking to a White Dwarf, but that's by the by....)

To say this film is slow is a fucking understatement. There are only two things slower than this: a date with Bill Oddie and a holodeck episode in Star Trek TNG. Essentially, there is nothing inherently wrong with the film. It is pretty much a 45 minute episode of Star Trek dragged out to 90 minutes with a half-baked story, more expensive special effects and gratuitous nudity. Which was the only reason that Robin Tunney was in this I feel - she was there to get naked, have sex with two different characters and then get flushed out of an airlock. Her character basically said nothing but showed her tits.

Oh god was it slow.....there is some plot, and it's a solid sci-fi Macguffin based story - some alien artifact that happens to make other aliens superstrong to hoodwink them into taking it back to their home planet/system, whereby it'll blow up and totally fuck with their civilisation. Variations of this type of Macguffin litter sci-fi and have huge stories based around - probably more than you can fit into a 90 minute to 2 hour film in fairness.....but this film skullfucks a good Macguffin harder than the last Indiana Jones film did.

The problem with high budget/high concept space based sci-fi is that it rarely fucking works because the concept ends up being toned down so that there aren't long bits of science to bog the audience down with before something fucking massive blows up with dramatic music playing. "Sunshine" worked by having enough plot devices in and around the core story to keep it going without getting boring. This is just one fucking plodding step after another - it's like a walk through an art gallery with no art and just some nice architecture. Like I said, it looks great. Ship design, special effects - all top notch.

As a slasher film in space it doesn't work simply because the man is powered by the Macguffin. Boring. He's not gone batshit mental. There are no aliens here, so it can't be an aliens in space film. And it clearly hasn't been written into a fictional "universe" with the sights on a franchise. No, it's a standalone film with a high concept and nothing else to salvage it from years drifting in space. A total fuck up (that everyone involved probably admits), and a prime example of why sci-fi films set in space rarely get made.

Overall 5/10: A little generous, but it fucking tried hard. But that's like saying you tried hard to take your pants off before you shit yourself.

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